Book review of the day: Death by Government

by Nige on March 4, 2018 at 10:30am

You can help. Send your book review to [email protected] and we will put it up when it is your turn. Please set your submission out with the name of the book, then the author and then describe in your own words what the book is about. Also if you happen to be a commenter please include your username.

This year we are going to review books daily until the reviews run out. By doing this for individual books this gives people a chance to do their own research on the books and authors by using the links provided and not miss out by being bombarded by a whole lot at once like we have done in previous years.

Each post is set out as comprehensively as possible with the name of who submitted it, the name of the book and author and a short review in the form of a comment from whoever submitted it.

Odd Ball said: “This book is grim reading, it faithfully records all the major mass murders throughout history of people killed by their own Government up to 1987.

I think it’s an important book, because it records all the atrocities that would otherwise be forgotten, for instance, it covers the ethnic cleansing that happened in Europe after World War 2.”

Amazon said: “This is R. J. Rummel’s fourth book in a series devoted to genocide and government mass murder, or what he calls democide. He presents the primary results, in tables and figures, as well as a historical sketch of the major cases of democide, those in which one million or more people were killed by a regime. In Death by Government, Rummel does not aim to describe democide itself, but to determine its nature and scope in order to test the theory that democracies are inherently nonviolent.

Rummel discusses genocide in China, Nazi Germany, Japan, Cambodia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Pakistan. He also writes about areas of suspected genocide: North Korea, Mexico, and feudal Russia. His results clearly and decisively show that democracies commit less democide than other regimes. The underlying principle is that the less freedom people have, the greater the violence; the more freedom, the less the violence. Thus, as Rummel says, “The problem is power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.”

Death by Government is a compelling look at the horrors that occur in modern societies. It depicts how democide has been very much a part of human history. Among other examples, the book includes the massacre of Europeans during the Thirty Years’ War, the relatively unknown genocide of the French Revolution, and the slaughtering of American Indians by colonists in the New World. This riveting account is an essential tool for historians, political scientists, and scholars interested in the study of genocide.”

If you have read this book or it reminds you of a story or something or someone in parliament then please go ahead and share in the comments section below.

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